« September 2006 | Main | November 2006 »
Or my teeth would be, if I ate all of this in one sitting. Here I sit, on a clear, cold Halloween morning, with a goodie bag that is bursting at the seams with treats.
Not one but two jars of Le Caramelier; my favorite teas from Mariage Freres; Henri Le Roux caramels; Bernachon chocolate; sugared violets; macaroons from Laduree. This isn't quite as wonderful as being in Paris, but it's pretty darn close.
Where, oh where, to begin?!
Happy Halloween!
SETTING: A late October afternooon. A woman sits at a large desk in front of a computer screen. Her fingers hit the keyboard in a steady, droning beat, as if there was a sign hanging over her head with the word D-E-A-D-L-I-N-E written on it. A phone rings, punctuating the silence.
HE: So I went to that place you told me about.
SHE (eagerly): The l'Etoile d'Or? You found it?
HE: I can’t believe I didn’t know about it before! The lady there was so cute! I think she’s famous or something. There was a group of very excited Japanese girls taking pictures of her. She told me in French to hurry up and buy what I wanted before they bought everything.
SHE: That was Denise Acabo! I can’t believe she was really there! Was her hair in pigtails? Was she wearing a tie?
HE: Yes! A tie! She must be at least fifty. She carries chocolate from Bernachon. So delicious. You won't believe how good it is. I hope I don’t eat everything before I get home.
SHE: Stop tormenting me! I’m jealous enough already. (sigh)
HE: These caramels are amazing.
SHE: Wait. You got the salted caramel spread, right? From Henri Le Roux? Not the individual caramels.
HE: But when I said "Henri Le Roux," this is what she...
SHE: The spread! You have to get the spread!
HE: It’s a spread? Are you sure?
SHE: I’m positive. It's called Salted Butter Caramel Spread. Le Caramelier. It comes in a little glass jar. David Lebovitz said it was amazing, and Catherine Nash adores it.
HE: But these caramels are perfectly…
SHE: You have to go back.
HE: Fine. I’ll go back.
SHE: I'm sorry, I didn't mean that you have to go back. I mean, if it's too much trouble...
HE: I'll go back. In fact, I'll call Denise right now and ask her to set a jar aside for me in case another pack of Japanese girls drops in.
SHE: I love you.
I’ve never met Mario Batali, like certain other lucky people, but I did make it to the end of Heat. Not a swaggering page-turner like Kitchen Confidential, this is a book that shows The New Yorker provenance of its author; it is, by turns, instructive, thoughtful and smart.
Granted, there are a few faux-shocking bits thrown in for good measure: Batali drinks an entire case of wine in one sitting? He flirts shamelessly with anything in a skirt? Yawn. I couldn’t care less about Mario’s personality tics; clearly, he’s a big, bawdy boy in orange rubber slippers, so let’s get on with it.
I was fascinated by the descriptions of the inner workings of the kitchen, the near-scientific breakdown of certain recipes (polenta, anyone?), and the bits of historical flotsam and jetsam Buford worked into the story that tethered the glittering present to the culinary past.
Several weeks after I turned the last page, here are the things that are still rattling about in my head:
1. It’s All About the Pasta Water. Although my pasta water could never be as scrumptious as the murky, starchy vat of goodness that sits on the stove at Babbo, Buford convinced me that reserving a bit of pasta water to toss in to my sauce at the end is a good idea. I’ve tried it several times since, and guess what? It’s true! My carbonara didn’t need more butter and cream to make the noodles slip and slide the way they should – it needed a splash of pasta water! The pasta water, Buford writes, “…flavors the pasta with the flavor of itself.” I’m a believer.
2. Tom Valenti is the Reason for the Short Ribs. According to Buford, Valenti brought the short rib into vogue in 1990, when he placed it on his menu. Short ribs were forty-five cents a pound 16 years ago; the same amount now costs north of five dollars. I thought about this recently when I sat down to one of my favorite dishes at Jeanty at Jack’s, the Kobe Beef Short Ribs, which are tender, unctuous morsels of sheer delight. While Philippe Jeanty may not agree that his short ribs have anything to do with a restaurateur in New York, I sent a silent thank-you out to whomever made this dish popular enough to make it to my mouth ~ not once, but numerous times ~ over the last few years.
3. There are No Shortcuts to Mastery. I knew this already, and so did you, but I forget sometimes. I make a dish twice, or three times, and get discouraged when it falls short of outstanding. I forget that if made the same dish fifty times, or a hundred, it would be better by far. In this day of 30-minute meals and crazy hectic schedules, the idea of repeating something over and over to achieve perfection is a laughably impractical notion. I daydream of being able to escape to a remote mountain village in Italy – or, better yet, a tiny village in France – to stand beside a real master for a few months and truly master one beautiful dish. Mario learned how to make pasta; Alex learned how to cut vegetables; Bill discovered the art of cutting up an animal. Mastery is neither easy nor cheap, and for now I’ll live vicariously through them.
About once a week, I point my browser towards Amazon.com to check on The Stinking Rose Restaurant Cookbook.
Not because I’m obsessed with the sales rank (abysmal right now, though the book is selling quite well in other channels) as many authors seem to be, but rather: I keep wondering if someone will write a review.
The first few weeks after the book came out, I wasn’t at all concerned; I assumed that the reviews were queuing up, waiting to be approved by the All-Knowing Amazon Moderator. I was certain that before long, Shirley from Nebraska would wax nostalgic about her trip to The Stinking Rose during her honeymoon weekend in San Francisco; Albert from Sacramento would share his experience making the 40-clove garlic chicken; Carol from Boston would write that she bought a book for both her sister and her mother, and they can’t thank her enough.
Now, months later, not a single person has submitted a review of the book. Not a Shirley or an Albert or a Carol, nor anyone else. I’m not taking it personally; I just find it fascinating. Why are some books deluged with reviews while others, like ours, have none?
I confess that I don’t write reviews myself. Back in the day, when Amazon only sold books and not also polka-dot platforms and Cheeky Lemon Lollipops, I occasionally contributed my thoughts about the latest from Margaret Atwood or my favorite Sharon Olds collection.
I can’t even remember when I last left a review. But other people apparently do, and wouldn't it follow that someone would have a few thoughts about the cookbook? I keep clicking… and hoping… that somewhere out there, Shirley is sitting down to type out her thoughts about what happened when she mixed up a batch of Gar-tinis to serve the guests at her Tupperware party.
A girl can dream, can’t she?
Wednesday night of this week was dark and rainy, the air threaded with chill. In the late afternoon, I stopped by Whole Foods on my way home from a day filled with meetings, hoping to be inspired with an answer to the age-old quandary of What to Make for Dinner.
I had a large-ish chunk of roasted lamb in the refrigerator, left over from the night before, and I wanted to use it up. As I steered my cart through the produce section, it occurred to me that I should make a simple pasta sauce with fresh vegetables and tomatoes, cooked just until their juices began to leak into the pan, punctuated with nuggets of lamb, all heaped atop a tangle of fresh pappardelle and smothered in shavings of Pecorino.
Satisfied with this vision, I dropped a bright green fennel bulb to my cart, followed by a couple of carrots. An onion. A few organic shiitake mushrooms. A pint of cherry tomatoes. A wedge of Pecorino, chalky-white.
Hours later, I finally got around to making said sauce. I sizzled the onions and carrots in olive oil, added a handful of minced garlic, tossed in diced chunks of fennel. Grated salt and pepper over the top. Stirred. Inhaled the sweet, rooty aromas. Smiled.
Chopped up the shiitakes, whack whack whack. Threw them in the pan. Stirred. Walked away for a second.
When I returned, the scents wafting out of the pan had changed, and not just a little bit.
My first thought: forest floor.
You know you’ve been in a tasting room of some dimly-lit Napa Valley winery (or, in my case, the edge of a bar in a restaurant where a wine rep is pouring out his or her latest vintage with the hope that you’ll add it to the list) when the person across the counter leans across and murmurs sweet nothings in your ear: Ripe fruit. New French Oak. Hints of leather. Forest floor.
You and I have both nodded, snug in the embrace of a muscular Zin or a silky Cabernet. Forest floor good. Forest floor yummy.
Until that same forest floor is scooped up and added to your pasta sauce. Then it doesn’t taste, or smell, quite so delectable. Being the optimist that I am, I forged on and added the lamb, hoping against hope that my nose was playing tricks on me.
It wasn’t. While the rain drummed against the windows, I choked down a few bites, unwilling to admit that I might as well be eating a pile of partially-decomposed leaves mixed with dirt. And so ended my most recent Wednesday evening.
It will be a few weeks before I’ll be able to trust another shiitake mushroom.
Klamath Falls is a small Oregon town located about 90 miles north of the California border. The town is nestled into a basin, a cluster of neighborhoods and businesses surrounded by the gentle slopes of the Cascade Mountains. It is not a particularly noteworthy spot; a large manufacturer of building products is the town’s main employer, and the cultural scene is virtually nil. It is cold – extremely so—for much of the year.
For those reasons and many more, you might never visit Klamath Falls unless, like me, you have a wonderful brother who lives there, and two adorable miniature people to whom you are an Auntie.
I drove up last weekend for a long-overdue visit, and my brother played the tour guide and showed me the relevant landmarks. He pointed to an enormous Wal-Mart, rising out of the ground like a behemoth grey box, where people from the surrounding countryside flock during the first weekend of every month. “The parking lot gets jam-packed,” he reported. “They spend their whole paycheck there.” Fifteen minutes later, the tour was over. “Now you know everything about Klamath Falls,” he said ruefully.
But what about the food? Was there anything that Klamath Falls was known for, any culinary tidbit that they claimed for their own?
